LANSING – As Detroit Democrats lash out at Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan for a review team to oversee the city’s finances, some of the lawmakers question if the governor is targeting minority-dominated communities for state takeover.

Snyder said the problems are rooted in the city’s troubled finances, and not the color of the people in charge.

“There is no racial element there,” he said during a morning press conference. “In Michigan we’ve had challenges on race. I don’t want to minimize the fact that race is an issue out there that we that always need to be sensitive to. And we should be.”

Lawmakers representing Detroit held two press conferences this week to denounce Snyder’s planned consent agreement with city leaders to turn finances over to a nine-member review board, picked by local and state leaders.

Womack pointed out Snyder has appointed emergency financial managers for Detroit schools, Flint, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Ecorse and Highland Park schools. Leaders in Muskegon Heights schools have asked for a review that could lead to a manager being appointed.

Snyder has approved a consent agreement with Inkster leaders for a seven-member review team to study the city’s books.

Dave Murray | MLive Media GroupState House representatives from Detroit met with the press on Tuesday, objecting to Snyder's plan for a financial review team in the city.

“Why is it that we only see emergency managers in cities dominated by minorities?” Womack asked. “Why are we not seeing the governor appoint emergency managers in places like Jackson?”

And Sen. Tupac Hunter, D-Detroit, said Thursday he doesn’t think the moves are racially motivated, but that residents are concerned by comments from Snyder, and said he needs to “approach things in a different manner.”

“You’ll have to ask the governor what he meant when he said the city of Detroit has a cultural problem,” he said.

In December, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to investigate the emergency manager law, saying it would “appear to violate the Voting Rights Act."

"While the law itself may be factually neutral, it would seem that it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion, as the impacted jurisdictions have very high proportions of African Americans and other minorities," Conyers wrote.

Snyder, speaking at a morning press conference, said the state involvement is based on financial issues exacerbated by population losses in the urban centers.

“The common denominator where you find these issues is population decline,” he said, flanked by Lt. Gov. Brian Calley and Harvey Hollins III, who heads the state’s Office of Urban Initiatives.

“It’s a case of watching the population drop fairly dramatically and the communities are not being able to, or having the challenge of, adjusting their cost structures to appropriately address that.

Snyder said people were surprised by the big drop in population in Detroit in the 2010 census.

“The key to success here is not just financial stability, but giving better services to citizens – buses, transit, lighting, and all those areas. Someone asked the question, ‘How do you know that you are succeeding?’ One of the best measures to say that things are working well is if Detroit is now growing. And we want to see that Detroit is now a city of 800,000 people, 900,000 people, back to a million people. That’s the kind of answer we all want.”